JavaOne Wrap-Up: New Products from dotFX, Canoo, Coverity, Infragistics, More

By John K. Waters

05/15/2008

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. -- This year's JavaOne Conference ended on a queasy note
last Friday when the local Department of Public Health warned attendees that
a virus -- the biological kind -- had gotten loose in San Francisco's Moscone
Center. The Associated Press reported that 67 Moscone staffers and three attendees
caught the highly contagious norovirus, which causes violent outbreaks of diarrhea
and vomiting and lasts 24 to 48 hours.

But that shouldn't be the last thing we remember from the 13th annual gathering of the Java faithful. The vendors were out in force at this year's show, with 137 exhibits and lots of product news. Here are a few under-reported vendor announcements that you should catch (no pun intended):

dotFX launched both
a company and a new software solution at this year's show. The Menlo Park,
Calif.-based startup unveiled its ServerFX product during co-founder Mark
Chen's "lightning talk" at the CommunityOne pre-conference event.
ServerFX is part of a "transparent runtime" service designed to
enable deployment of fully functional and secure Internet applications based
on Java. According to co-founder Phil Straw, the product provides "a
set of runtime services, including click-to-run execution, incremental installation
and update, a security model, online and offline execution modes, and the
ability to run any part of the application on any local or remote device."
The company's other products include ClientFX, AdminFX and InstallFX, all
of which are currently available as free downloads during the beta release
period.

Veteran code analysis tools maker Parasoft rolled out a new app security solution at this year's show. The literally
named Parasoft Application Security Solutions is designed to make sure that
security verification and remediation tasks are "ingrained" in the
workflow across every stage of the software development lifecycle. Developers
secure code by simply responding to the reported tasks. "True success
in application security requires an in-line process to prevent security vulnerabilities
and ensure that the application adheres to the organization's security policy,"
said Wayne Ariola, Parasoft's VP of strategy, in a statement.

Representatives of Canoo flew all the way from Switzerland to staff a booth at this year's show, where
it demoed the new release of the company's rich Internet application library.
Called the UltraLightClient, the library "focuses on making the development
and deployment of Web applications faster and easier," the company said.
The library is designed to bridge the gap between Java Swing user interface
components and a Web architecture. The company bills that bridge as "a
cost-efficient, single-technology and mature approach to AJAX." Among
the notable new features in this release are a project setup wizard for Eclipse,
the ability to generate an end-to-end app skeleton from a predefined data
structure, a forms development component, and sortable ULC tables by default.
A milestone release is available for download now; the final release is expected
near the end of June or the beginning of July 2008.

Validy showed off its SoftNaos for Java at the show. Headquarter in Romans-sur-Isère, France, with offices in Portland, Ore., the company developed its patented "Validity Technology" to protect software against piracy and sabotage. SoftNaos is the first commercial implementation of the Validy Technology. As the company explains it, SoftNaos is designed to "prevent software piracy and guarantee the integrity of software execution by simultaneously using a software transformation and a secure electronic component. The protected software transformation is generated by the Validy SoftNaos post-compiler." The company said it is planning to use the technology to develop security solutions for C, C++ and C# applications.

Coverity drew a fair crowd on the
show floor for demos of its new Thread Analyzer for Java. The tool is aimed
at the newest pain point for developers: multi-core processors and the inherent
potential for concurrency defects in multi-threaded apps. The Thread Analyzer
for Java "observes" code as it's executed and automatically identifies
race conditions and deadlocks. The San Francisco-based company calls the product
"unique in the field of dynamic analysis" because it detects not
only problems in limited testing environments, but also those with the potential
to occur over extended operations in field environments. "This distinction
is particularly important for multi-threaded applications that, due to their
complexity, may run without failure for extremely long periods of time before
a 'perfect storm' of system events triggers a concurrency defect," the
company says.

Infragistics unveiled a new package of AJAX-enabled tools at the show. The Princeton, N.J.-based
company makes presentation-layer development tools, and its new offering,
NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1, targets Web developers who want to leverage
JavaServer Faces for quick and easy UI development. This new release bundles
an AJAX-enabled JSF UI components for building commercial Web 2.0 apps in
J2EE environments. "With the ability to create re-useable components,"
the company said, "[the tools] help Java enterprise developers create
consistent experiences with less code in less time." The new version
of NetAdvantage for JSF comes with IBM WebSphere, JBoss and Weblogic portal
support; improved Editable DataTables; and a Dialog Window feature to integrate
design-time capabilities with common dialog window behaviors.

Another hometown company, San Francisco-based Isomorphic
Software, introduced version 6.5 of its AJAX RIA platform at this year's
show. The 10-year-old company bases all its products on its flagship SmartClient
technology, an AJAX framework designed to "combine the productivity and
performance of traditional desktop software with the simplicity and reach
of an open Web platform." SmartClient combines an open DHTML-AJAX client
engine, rich user interface components and metadata-driven client-server databinding
systems. The list of new features in version 6.5 of the AJAX RIA platform
includes new "skinning" features, including TreeFrog skin; dynamic
frozen columns support for all ListGrids and TreeGrids; dynamic group-by-field-value
support for all ListGrids; new client- and server-side support for file upload;
in-line editing and expanded APIs for data cubes/OLAP grids; and support for
Adobe AIR, Firefox 3 (beta), Internet Explorer 8 (beta) and Windows Safari
3.1, among others.

Layer 7 Technologies didn't roll out anything new at the show, but the Washington, D.C.-based company
was boasting its recent "Cool Vendor" nod from industry analysts
at Gartner. Layer 7 provides SOA security and governance infrastructure for
next-gen service-oriented and Web-oriented integrations. The company demoed
its SecureSpan family of XML appliances and gateway software at its show-floor
booth. Layer 7 co-authored the WS-Policy. Its family of SOA gateways is designed
to provide end users with centralized monitoring and management of production
SOA preferences, such as service access, message security, availability, SLA
conformance, virtualization and data validation.

Beverly, Mass.-based Altova announced the availability of a new release of its XMLSpy. Version 2008 Release
2 of the company's flagship XML editor comes with enhancements aimed at helping
users optimize their XML development processes. Among those enhancements are
support for very large files (four to five times larger than those supported
in past versions); support for Java, C#, JavaScript and VBScript in the company's
XSLT engines; integration with Visual Studio 2008; new XSLT Information Windows;
and advanced Find & Replace in XML Schema Editor, among others.

About the Author

John K. Waters is a freelance writer based in Silicon Valley. He can be reached
at john@watersworks.com.